Research Interests: Modern theatre and performance studies in Europe, Africa and the Americas; theatre, prose and graphic narrative from (South) Africa in Afrikaans and Zulu as well as English; Critical theory especially Marxist, materialist and decolonial

Intellectual Profile

BA (Hons) University of Cape Town, South Africa; MA, PhD Comparative literature, Cornell University and supplementary study at the Institut d’études théâtrales, University of Paris III; Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Free University Berlin

Multilingual as well as interdisciplinary, Loren Kruger’s research includes The National Stage (University of Chicago Press), which focuses on England France and America but has been cited by researchers from India to Ireland, Croatia to China, South Africa to Slovenia, and Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge University Press), which won the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Study awarded by the Modern Language Association. Her most recent book, Imagining the Edgy City covers film and fiction, public art and architecture as well as performance of poetry and theatre in Johannesburg “the Chicago of South Africa,” and compares Johannesburg with other cities from Chicago to Paris, Berlin to Bogotá, Sydney to São Paolo

Professor Kruger’s research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation; US Dept of of Education, the German Academic Exchange Service and the American Society of Theatre Research and teaching innovation supported by the Mellon Foundation for Languages Across Chicago, Center for Disciplinary Innovation, and U Chicago Arts. She has served as the editor of Theatre Journal, on the advisory boards of other journals from the African Media Journal to Theatre Research International. and on the executive committee of the American Society for Theatre Research

Work with Students

PhD thesis highlights: Economy and Ecology in the Contemporary African Novel; Theatre Culture and Everyday Life in Victorian England; Skpeticism in Samuel Beckett and Stanley Cavell; The Immigrant Scene: Fiction, Film, and Theatre in Immigrant America

MA thesis highlights: Contemporary Indian Theatre in South Africa; Post-Apartheid Landscape in Nadine Gordimer’s stories; Class and Theatre in 1950s Britain; The Figure of the Artist in the Plays of Howard Barker; Walter Benjamin's "Theses on History" and the theory of drama

BA thesis highlights: Theatre and Atrocity in Post-World War II France; Aesthetics and Politics in the Bread and Puppet Theatre; Irish Nationalist History in Juno and the Paycock; adaptation and production of Une si longue lettre by Mariamma Bâ

Beyond the TRC: Truth, Power, and Representation in South Africa After Transition: review essay on The Era of Transitional Justice by Paul Gready, Performing South Africa=s Truth Commission by Catherine Cole, and South African Literature after the Truth Commission by Shane Graham, Research in African Literatures 42, no.2 (2011): 184-96